Zume

"Every two weeks, each person at Zume has a one-hour, one-on-one conversation with whomever they report to. (Julia and I converse with each other.) It’s a sacred time. You cannot be late; you cannot cancel. There’s only one other rule: You don’t talk about work. The agenda is you, the individual, and what you are trying to accomplish personally over the next two to three years, and how you’re breaking that into a two-week plan. I like to start with three questions: What makes you very happy? What saps your energy? How would you describe your dream job?"

"It’s hard to deny the explicit value of OKRs, like how they help tie an organization to the leadership’s true ambitions. But for young companies like Zume, especially, there’s an equally important implicit value that gets overlooked. OKRs are a superb training tool for executives and managers. They teach you how to manage your business within existing limits. It’s important to push the envelope, but the envelope is real. Everybody faces resource constraints: time, money, people. And the bigger an organization, the more entropy—it’s like thermodynamics."